NATIONAL | The rise of traditional 3D printers is already heralding a new age in technology, the revolutionary devices can print anything from a gun to a teddy bear. And well… printing a living human being? That feat is still well off… but soon you may be able to order your own replacement parts because a group of researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have developed a 3D bioprinter that can create human cells.

The researchers there in North Carolina have two such bioprinters and they’re currently working on how to use the Bioprinter to, get this – create human skin and vital organs.

These devices could impact the lives of thousands of people each year, and could eventually save millions of lives. There is a critical shortage of human organs available for transplant. When donor organs can be found, they are often located far from the intended recipient. This means the body parts must be flown in from other parts of the world – or cultivated from the global human organ black market – and then the organ may still be rejected by the patient’s body. Using future printers, hospitals could just print out a perfect organ, whenever they needed one based on your own genetic code.

Kidney cells have been produced on the bioprinters and when implanted into animals, they formed mini-kidneys, which functioned the way they were intended.

The researchers have already developed miniature human livers, each smaller than a golf ball. Too small to function in humans, but this proof of concept shows that their goal can likely be reached soon.

Lead researcher Anthony Atala said, “Printing came about as a way to scale up the tissues and organs we were already creating by hand.”

The research is funded by the Department of Defense through the “body on a chip” project intended to test the effect of drugs on the human body. The military is especially interested in how these bioprinted miniature organs react to drugs used to treat the effects of chemical and biological weapons.

Keith Murphy, the CEO of Organovo, another organization working on the technology, said “You can make living structures act like living tissues. You don’t need the full organ to have an impact.”

Although we are a long way away from being able to print complete, live humans on bioprinters, this technology is a step in that direction.

We may soon see a day where hospitals order up organs from 3d bioprinters – on demand – to replace the damage done – by a 3D printed Gun.

(1) http://www.nationaljournal.com/innova…

http://www.wakehealth.edu/Research/WF…

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/3-d…

http://www.businessinsider.com/organo…

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